Augustine and the Bizarre Creatures

I’m currently listening to Augustine’s City of God. It definitely shows its age. His Confessions is much more timeless. LibriVox is a great resource (there is even an app for that). I don’t have the patience to read the work. I listen to it in the background while I’m cleaning. Some passages are brilliant, but most are either outdated, irrelevant, or superfluous. It’s not necessarily Augustine’s fault. He lived in the 4th century and wrote City of God in the early 5th after the sack of Rome by Alaric. If you are interested (as I am) in medieval history you should read it because it was highly cited by theologians, philosophers, and especially political leaders beginning in the Carolingian Empire.

In Chapter 8 of Book XVI, Augustine describes what is taught in the secular histories of his day. These things were believed by people until the modern era. Too funny!

It is also asked whether we are to believe that certain monstrous races of men, spoken of in secular history, have sprung from Noah’s sons, or rather, I should say, from that one man from whom they themselves were descended. For it is reported that some have one eye in the middle of the forehead; some, feet turned backwards from the heel; some, a double sex, the right breast like a man, the left like a woman, and that they alternately beget and bring forth: others are said to have no mouth, and to breathe only through the nostrils; others are but a cubit high, and are therefore called by the Greeks “Pigmies:”they say that in some places the women conceive in their fifth year, and do not live beyond their eighth. So, too, they tell of a race who have two feet but only one leg, and are of marvellous swiftness, though they do not bend the knee: they are called Skiopodes, because in the hot weather they lie down on their backs and shade themselves with their feet. Others are said to have no head, and their eyes in their shoulders; and other human or quasi-human races are depicted in mosaic in the harbor esplanade of Carthage, on the faith of histories of rarities. What shall I say of the Cynocephali, whose dog-like head and barking proclaim them beasts rather than men? But we are not bound to believe all we hear of these monstrosities.

With beliefs such as these it is no wonder that xenophobia reigned supreme.

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Published by Fariba

I am a PhD student in French with a particular interest in late medieval and early modern religious rhetoric and performance. I love browsing research libraries and shopping at used bookstores for obscure/lesser known books.
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2 thoughts on “Augustine and the Bizarre Creatures”

Believe it or not similar superstitious beliefs are relevant even to today. It might sound utterly ridiculous to an urban individual, but highly plausible to one who does not know better. Ignorance is a very dangerous state of being for the most part — and then there’s the fear of the unknown.